56. Chapter Fifty-Six #3
I get out of bed and hold out my hand. She takes it, and I lead her out to the living room, where Stanley and Aspen are already parked under the tree.
Benson and Lucy are coming down the stairs and Gianna’s cross-legged on the floor in a Santa hat, and a dozen versions of Merry Christmas go around the room at once, overlapping, warm, everyone talking over everyone.
Blue and Melly come down last, sleepy and rumpled and pleased with themselves.
Rowan stands in the kitchen’s doorway with a mug in his hand.
We settle in around the tree and start pulling presents out from under it, paper already going everywhere.
“Okay, I want to see what everybody got.” Stanley claps his hands together. “Mon Petit Percy. You first, brother. Go.”
Gianna spins around and gets her phone up, filming, as I reach under the tree and pull out the gift I got for Penelope. And at the exact same moment, she holds one out to me.
We both look down at the shape and weight of what’s in our hands. Then we look up at each other.
Same size. Same shape. Same rectangle.
We open them at the same time, and I feel myself sink back into the couch, because I know what it is before the paper’s even all the way off.
I slide it out, and she’s given me a framed photo — all of us at the ski lodge, the whole crew crammed into the frame, me and Penelope in the middle, Stanley and Aspen, Benson and Lucy, Blue and Melly, then Rowan and Gianna bookending the ends.
Every single person I’ve got, in one frame.
And when I turn to her, she’s holding up what she just unwrapped: a framed photo of the two of us, her and me, grinning like fools after a game, my hair sweat-soaked and her arms slung around my neck.
We gave each other the same gift. Different photos, identical idea.
“You two are ridiculous.” Stanley’s cackling. “Did you plan this? Tell the truth right now—”
“You’re so perfect for each other it’s honestly disgusting,” Gianna says, still filming.
“You two are meant to be,” Melly says, soft, from Blue’s side.
“I love it,” Penelope whispers into my chest, gone bright red. “Thank you.”
I kiss the top of her head. “I love you. Merry Christmas.”
The living room roars on without us — Stanley narrating his own gift like it’s breaking news, Gianna still filming everything, wrapping paper drifting across the floor like more snow. Nobody notices when I take Penelope’s hand and the framed photo she gave me and pull her down the hall to my room.
I shut the door, and the whole loud house drops to a muffle behind it.
I go to my dresser, prop the photo frame she just gifted me on top, and then I open the top drawer.
It’s still in there, right where it’s been since August, laid flat and protected between two pieces of cardboard.
Penelope’s drawing. The one she made of the two of us in her kitchen — last year’s Christmas present when it was just her and me at Hawthorne.
I love this Christmas gift more than anything I own.
There’s a nail in the wall by the window. It’s been there since I moved in. I have looked at that empty nail every single day for four months.
I lift the drawing out of the cardboard. I turn it face-up. And I hang it on the nail.
I step back.
The two of us. On the wall. Out of the drawer and up in the light, in my room, in this house — a picture of the girl I once had only in secret, only in the dark, only in the last twenty minutes of the day.
Hung up where the morning sun will fall across it.
Where I’ll see it the second I open my eyes.
Where it isn’t going anywhere, ever again.
Penelope goes still beside me.
“Percy,” she says, barely above a breath.
“I’m sorry I didn’t put it up sooner.”
That’s all I can get out while we admire it on the wall.
I have spent my entire life keeping everything I loved boxed up and braced for goodbye, holding it all out at arm’s length so the losing wouldn’t cost so much, and I am done.
Done doing that to the things that matter.
Done doing it to her. But I don’t have those words, I’ve never had those words, so I just stand there and look at the wall and pray she can read the rest of it off my face the way she always has.
She takes my hand.
She read it. She knows. She somehow always does.
Down the hall somebody hollers my name — Stanley, then Benson, then the whole house picking it up like a chant, demanding us to come back.
“Be right out,” I call.
But I don’t move yet.
I stand there a minute longer with her hand in mine, in the first home that was ever really mine, in the first family I ever got to keep, next to the first person I ever let myself love the whole way down — and I look at the two of us up on that wall.
I kiss the top of her head. She pulls my face down to kiss me.
Down the hall, they’re back to chanting my name.
I kiss her one more time, and then we walk back out to everyone sitting in the living room. I sit on the couch with Penelope in my lap and listen to the whole loud warm family around us.
This.
This I get to keep.
THE END.